Care about politics?  Of course you do. Horrified by the current federal election campaign?  Of course you are.  Well, the One Thought blog has you covered: an entire week on previous federal election campaigns, just to keep you distracted from the present one! 

This is fascinating, I swear.  No, really.

Over the summer, I spent a ludicrous amount of time on Université Laval’s Poltext site, which contains all the federal election manifestos going back to 1949 (and much else besides), and it occurred to me that simply looking at the manifestos and the commitments contained therein is a pretty interesting way of looking at the history of Canadian post-secondary education and its changing status in a federal state.  

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin.

Let’s start out with the St. Laurent and Diefenbaker governments. These are pretty easy because neither Liberals nor Conservatives ever mentioned education, research, or anything like that until 1962.  “Social policy” was a concern, but that mainly meant housing and pensions.  “Economic policy” was a concern, but that mostly meant mining, agriculture, fisheries and international trade.  Knowledge industries and their inputs were simply not on the radar screen.

The two parties that did have something to say about education generally were the Social Credit/Créditiste Party and the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)/New Democratic Party (NDP).  As early as 1949, the Socreds were talking about the need to grant scholarships for “deserving” students (no definition given) and grants to provinces to encourage “the highest possible standards in education” though by this they seem to have meant both K-12 and post-secondary education. The commitment was likely a nod towards a need for a post-war rebalancing of fiscal federalism, not a specific claim for universities.  The Socreds, not known for their wonkery, tended not to change the wording of their platform from one election to the next, sticking to the exact wording of their scholarship commitment in the subsequent elections of 1953, 1957 and 1958.

In 1949, CCF made commitments similar to the Socreds with respect to aid to deserving students, but also made a number of commitments around secondary education including school construction, teachers’ salaries, adult education and ensuring instruction in music, drama, art and physical fitness.  None of these commitments included any nod to the notion of provincial jurisdiction.  From 1953 onwards, the CCF was still making significant promises in all areas of education, but it came with phrases like “full recognition and protection of provincial jurisdiction over education”, which made it clear that all these promises were going to be fulfilled via generous transfers to provinces, particularly the poorer ones (the exception was the scholarship promise;  these, pretty clearly, were supposed to come from Ottawa). 

And then, all of a sudden, everything changes in 1962. 

The Conservatives made no specific promises that year, but not unjustifiably trumpeted their actions during their term of office, which included making tuition tax deductible and increasing the funding that the federal government provided to universities (since 1957, the federal government had been distributing grants to institutions, without going through the provinces, via a shell corporation operated by a forerunner of Universities Canada).  The Socreds, for the first time in fifteen years, came up with a new policy idea, which was for Ottawa to give provinces money so they could start their own “revolving scholarships” schemes (this appears to be a euphemism for student loans).

The NDP, which replaced the CCF in 1961, continued its “we’ll do everything through the provinces” line, but it became a lot more specific over what exactly it was the provinces were meant to be doing.  Education was now described as a “basic human right” and knowledge/skills were described as “the greatest single factor making for increasing productivity.” Under a NDP government, grants to provinces were going to “permit” provinces to provide: (a) free education at all levels to all those who can benefit from it; (b) scholarships and bursaries to assist deserving students; (c) capital for school and university expansion; (d) adequate training facilities and salaries for teachers. Discussions of fiscal federalism had not yet progressed to the point of working out what was supposed to happen if provinces chose not to go along with these ideas: it was just “we’re going to give provinces money and magic will happen”.

Of significant interest is the NDP’s interest in skills training, specifically in relation to what was then called “automation”.  This was a big deal south of the border at the time, with President Kennedy calling the challenge of maintaining employment levels in the face of automation “the biggest challenge of his administration” (this was before the Cuban Missile Crisis).  The NDP wanted to ensure the benefits of automation were shared.  That meant – among other things – special programs to re-train and relocate displaced workers, which marks the first time that skills (as opposed to education more broadly) made it into a federal program.

The Liberals also broke new ground on a number of fronts.  They promised a new loans program under which “all qualified university students will be able to borrow if necessary for genuine educational needs”, as well as 10,000 merit-based “Canada Scholarships” each valued at $1000 a year and available for four years of study, with program administration being independent of government (in many ways foreshadowing the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation).  Increases to university grants distributed through the aforementioned shell corporation were also promised.  However, with the Quiet Revolution in full swing, the Liberals were careful to include language allowing provinces to “opt-out with compensation”, a new concept at the time.

Another first in the Liberal program was a promise to “encourage and assist basic and applied research by the universities and industry”, which marked the first time that research of any description made a federal electoral program.  The Liberals wanted to churn out detailed studies, industry by industry, co-ordinating university research with that of government agencies and using them to find economic ways to process primary materials in Canada and export finished products of higher value (in other words, the studies were mostly about exports).

In short, 1962 was a watershed year.  It was the point where education, research and skills suddenly became issues of national political import.  And yet, crucially, it also happened at the exact point that Quebec’s national aspirations were making themselves felt: 1962 was the first federal election after Jean Lesage ousted the Union Nationale.  The tension between these two competing priorities – dealing with the modern knowledge economy and dealing with Quebec’s insistence on respecting the terms of the BNA Act with respect to education – would shape the politics of higher education in Canada for another five decades.